Monday, August 14, 2017

Kosher Blue Nun spotted in Jerusalem!

Jerusalem had its 14th yearly "Jerusalem Wine Festival" at the Israel Museum (and being in Jerusalem almost every offering is mehadrin kosher). As opposed to past years I did not see the event heavily advertised, perhaps they wanted less of a crowd or knew what they offered this year would not be as extensive.

The festival in the last few years has been getting a reputation of going up in price and down in quality. Personally I haven’t agreed till this year where the cost of a ticket plus transport plus time wasn’t so worth it for someone coming without a car.

Ticket cost was 95 NIS + transport with a chofshi yomi 26.5 NIS. NIS 121 is quite expensive for an evening that doesn't even include food for the average Israeli who’s trying to get by. The festival isn’t supposed to be a fancy event though it is upscale. It’s more to get people drinking wine and a fun night out in the summer.

The festival certainly gives a chance to meet new wineries and other wine compatible producers and products (chocolate and olive oil, for example) to people who would not otherwise get exposure to them. For me I like to go for the night out and see what’s new from different wineries or find wines that I've never heard of… Israel has a lot of boutique wineries that are hidden secrets.

I also enjoy going to buy and see the gourmet products like 424 salt or Tishbi wine jellies as I don’t find such things sold in my community and truthfully you don’t find them much either in the kosher community focused supermarkets.

In the next article I'll talk about some of the wines I tried, and a few I purchased for special occasions. One of the oddest for me was the picture above, "Blue Nun". My father from the U.S. mentioned this is a known popular mid-market non-kosher wine in the U.S., but I had never heard of it before. As you can see from the photo, they've come out with a kosher product (under U.S. Triangle-K supervision). Many of the kosher-keeping attendees were put off by the photo (Judaism has a history of persecution by the Catholic church, the source of "nuns") as well as not being familiar with U.S. kosher supervisions. In Hebrew it says it's a Gewurtztraminer Riesling.

If kosher wine articles from Israel are something that interests you, please let me know in the comments and we'll see if we can make this a regular article here.